St. Patrick’s Day!!!

You know what time it is??!!! It’s the celebration for all of us Irishmen! We definitely love our Irish heritage and sport our green for Ireland on March 17! Thanks to Walmart and the local Dollar Tree, I was able to score some awesome “loot” to help the kiddos celebrate! Missing from this picture is my son’s green leprechaun hat, four more pairs of shamrock socks, Sweet Pea’s larger shamrock drop earrings, and two more scarves. My kiddos always get super excited and then race away with their loot. I’ve been know to hang on to stuff so that they actually know “where it is” come Thursday….hahaha.

I try and integrate the holidays into every aspect of our lives. With St. Patrick’s Day, this is no acception, Pinterest always has a ton of ideas. If you want to see some of the things we have done in years past, you can check out another blog I did on St. Patrick’s Day here.

Let me take a second to be “real” about holidays. Holidays can be so fun to celebrate and some years we just do as much as we can. However, other years…I am glad to just watch the day pass without doing anything. Then, some years I just do something simple that the kids will enjoy. So…when you are reading a blog for holiday ideas, pick and choose what you want. Don’t feel the need to do everything. It’s suppose to be helpful not burdensome.

(Back when they were little….)

School work/Activities:

*I recently registered as an Amazon affiliate, which means I make a small percentage back when someone purchases from one of my links. Please know that this blog, has always and will always be my thoughts and will not be biased by any promotion or product. In looking at this program, I decided that I LOVE the ease of amazon prime myself and often “link” their products for the ease of my readers. It seemed to be a great way to make a little money to lighten my own Amazon cart…haha. ***

I wish I had remembered that these great books were in my amazon “cart” on Monday when I sent my mom her birthday present. When I opened my St. Patrick’s Day tote from the basement, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t invested in any good books for the kiddos. After the large number of books I have for St. Valentine, I’m definitely lacking with St. Patrick. Well, with these two purchases, we will be well on our way in getting our library for this holiday established.

I love all the Tomie De Paola books and am super excited to add this one to our collection.

This book looks like a great way to introduce St. Patrick to young children.

I have also found that super teacher worksheets is invaluable for me as a homeschooling mom when I am looking to cover holidays or different concepts with my kiddos. At $19.99 for the year, I feel like it’s a great deal. I can easily gather worksheets using Math, Readiing Comprehension or puzzle-making skills to celebrate any holiday. The great thing about this site is that you can save the worksheets onto your computer for the next year!

Here are some of the ones we used this year:

Catholic Heritage Curricula has this awesome coloring page available here.

I also did a quick activity teaching the little girls about the Trinity here.

The children typically wake up to their place set along with Lucky Charms and some green blueberry muffins. Let me go on the record as saying that I hate Lucky Charms….but my kids have developed their father’s love for sugar cereal and since this is a once-a -year treat…they indulge!

This year we are going to be using our knowledge of tallying and graphing along with our Lucky Charms. This is a link to the graphing page. It will redirect you to the teachers pay teachers website. Now….I totally understand if you find this frustrating…because I do too. I just want to be able to push a link and print out a cute worksheet. However, I have found many benefits to using this website. First, it’s free to sign up and if you “save” your login information on your computer, no worries of forgetting. Plus, many of the Pinterest worksheets are now found on this system. In addition, every few weeks they send me a link of several “free” downloads for the week. They are usually time-related and I typically download most of them.

Here are some updated pictures that I took after we completed the activity:

Let’s chat food:

This year it’s Guinness Shepherd’s Pie for dinner:

I’m going to give this project to Sweet Pea. She will love to try her hand at some Irish Soda bread, and the little munchkins will gobble it up while they complain about the shepherd’s pie and beg for dessert….haha.

This year we are going to try our hand at these Irish potatoes for dessert.